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Informationen zum Autor Mark Henshaw is a graduate of Brigham Young University and a decorated CIA analyst with more than sixteen years of service. In 2007, Henshaw was awarded the Director of National Intelligence Galileo Award for innovation in intelligence analysis. A former member of the Red Cell think tank, Henshaw is the author of Red Cell , Cold Shot , The Fall of Moscow Station , and The Last Man in Tehran , and lives with his family in Leesburg, Virginia. Visit him at MarkHenshaw.com. Klappentext Includes an excerpt from The fall of Moscow station.Cold Shot 16 April 2006 Al-Yusufiyah, Baghdad Province, Iraq 25 km southwest of Baghdad The house seemed out of place for this town, larger and more ornate than the others Marisa Mills could see from the rooftop. She guessed that there were only a hundred buildings scattered across the settlement, all bricks and dirty cement, mostly shops on the ground floors with apartments above. This particular home was one of the largest structures of any kind within sight, smaller only than the three mosques she could identify. It was two stories, white with columns in front and a small dome on top. A mud-colored concrete wall enclosed the villa’s courtyard, head-high with iron gates on opposing sides. The owner was clearly Sunni. No such home would have survived unscathed in this town had the owner followed any other religious path. The Sunnis here had little tolerance for the Shiites, less for the Americans, and the butchery of recent months had left Marisa wondering whether the residents weren’t killing just for sport now. That the owner had money wasn’t even in question. Whether the man supported the insurgency was a question that the Army Rangers moving to surround the building intended to settle. “They’re moving a bit fast on this one,” Marisa observed. “You know the Rangers,” the man to her left said. “They’re not really happy unless they’re engaged in a little property damage.” Jonathan Burke held his own field glasses to his eyes and swept them over the soldiers moving toward the house. “Patience is a virtue.” “And not actually part of the Ranger Creed,” Jon noted. “I thought you were going to miss this one.” “My flight was late.” “I keep telling Congress I wasn’t even at Abu Ghraib. But you know congressmen. They lie so much that they can’t believe anyone else tells the truth. But it helped that there are no traffic laws around here. I made up for lost time after we landed.” “I thought patience was a virtue.” “No sense rushing into a firefight if you can take your time and shut the enemy down before things begin,” she replied. The two CIA officers were lying on a rooftop a hundred meters from the raid site. The woman was, in fact, lying closer to Jon than was strictly necessary but he seemed oblivious to Mari’s frustration. A pair of Rangers were prone near the edge of the rooftop forty feet to their right. One half of the sniper team there had his hands wrapped around a Barrett M82 rifle. The other was staring at the house through a Leupold Mark 4 spotting scope. “You sound like a Sun Tzu disciple,” Jon said. “Nope. More like Stalin.” She stared down at the compound through a pair of Leica Viper binoculars and envied the courtyard roof inside. Any shade in this country dropped the temperature twenty degrees, but she and Jonathan were in the open, exposed to the Iraqi sun for which boonie hats and sunglasses helped little even at this early-morning hour. Although the sun still sat low on the horizon, it was well over a hundred degrees, and would be twenty degrees hotter by noon. “Who was the first guy who thought settling down here would be a good idea?” “The Sumer...
